An Episode of Not Quite Dead.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains:

References to death, grief and loss

Mentions of blood

Emotional response to trauma (struggling to form words; breath catching)

Minimisation of traumatic experiences

Mention of the the medical abuse of children

Implication of intent to kill

Implication of kidnapping

Transcript

[WIND IN TREES]

NEIGE

Well I am recording it like you asked.

Sort of asked, heavily implied a desire for.

Et voila, un record, d’accord?

Eh it does worry me that I have felt so compelled to do this but.

Well. Franchement. I have not been doing well since I left. It has only been a few hours.

Ach I am a wreck. You will be alright, I am certain.

Non. That is a lie, I am not certain of this.

I will be back with you soon.

I am of two minds of whether to call you. It might make it harder for us to be apart if I do. I remember the first time I used a phone. To hear someone’s voice and still be apart from them. It was a marvel but it made me ache. I have never truly taken to it.

This, though, I find surprisingly, uh. What is the word? Assouplir? Non. Clarifier l’esprit?

Ah. Sans tenir compte,  I can do this without feeling like my throat is sealing shut. No other person right there listening as I speak, separated from me by miles.

I can see the benefits of being able to speak freely, conversationally, at distance, instantaneously. writing is to signify, but with spoken words there is a clearer indication of tone, oui?

But aloes, then they invented all of this, eh, video calling putain de ridicule. I do not— awful, I revile it. Horrible. To see a face you cannot reach out to touch if you will it? And in honesty, who would you call in this way who you did not wish to be close to? I want to be able to smell your skin, to touch it.

Ach. It has not yet been a day!

If I am to be honest with myself it is… I am simply afraid.

But if I put words to it, I keep thinking that this is the first time you have been alone since Casper left.

I suppose you were alone when…

When they took me.

Non, putain, non. I cannot think of it.

I have too much to do.

You are a bad influence upon me, mon râleur, you see how much I ramble now? I speak to freely, you have taught me this horrible vice and I fear it will take centuries to be cured of it. Like when I took diaries for a while.

Ach. I should not have mentioned this. You are going to ask questions about it and— non. This is not— I will discuss it with you.

It is just that I will have to explain things with Cosette and this is not the time for it. I will have to say I have seen her, of course, I would not keep that from you. But it will be strange to think of the two of you meeting. But you ought to. You will like her. I am. I hope you like her. How strange, to think of you speaking to one another. You are so young, materially, but to me, Cosette? She is ma petite fleur. She will remain so as long as she lives, and I will do anything to ensure that is a long fucking time.

Anyway, it will be important for me to go to speak to her in Venice. She will be able to speak to the other vampires there, and they will respond well to her. They always do. But there is no point going to her without first gathering more information.

What is frustrating, what has been frustrating me, is the lack of clarity on Casper’s behaviour after he and Bonham fell apart. I don’t know why but it seems to me that grasping the nature of Casper’s disavowal of Bonham is central to an understanding of what they would both go on to do next.

And Casper is gone, he cannot tell us now. So we will have to piece together what is going on ourselves.

What is tricky here is that Bonham has embedded himself into human society in several ways. This is useful and I know many vampires who do this. Inna, who you will no doubt have met by now, she is a lawyer, pour example, she has some influence in human spaces and it offers advantages to other vampires who know her that she has these, oui?

It is smart to make sure some vampires are doing this, but we have to make sure that none of them are trying to climb to points of too high significance. Police chief? This is fine. Head of FBI? Less so, comprend?

Le problème then is that it can cause real ruckus and distress when you attempt to look for vampires who are in these positions. They can make your life difficult if you wish to, say, limit their career in politics. Such is the case with potential immortality that even mediocre investments will eventually yield massive wealth. This is a problem eventually, because all of these systems change eventually, but on a scale of decades, a century or two? It is easy for a vampire to accumulate enough wealth so as to make themselves difficult to touch.

This is why I end up killing so many people, non? They do not give me a choice. They will not relinquish their position and they put dozens, hundreds of lives on the line when they don’t. I take no pleasure in it but it must be done.

Ah. That is a lie, I do take pleasure in it sometimes. Honestly, who spends their first decades of eternity trying to assert petty power over people who will not live past what will one day be like a mid-afternoon to them? There are more important things. Passion. The will to live.

Ach, I’m getting carried away. The point is that I am at this house of records and I believe I will be able to ascertain an address for a certain doctor whom I am convinced once worked with Bonham. That is what I am doing here. I will stop recording this now.

CLICK

CLICK

[WIND IN TREES]

Well I have found some records but frustratingly many of these people are dead. This is the trouble with humans, you see. All the time they are dying. It’s very frustrating. They’re so interesting and live so much in their little lives and yet you stop paying attention for a decade or two and oh la la they have died. Not even in some tragic way, just of aging. Not even sad, really, just an ordinary part of being alive.

I wonder how long it is possible for us to live. I have wondered on this much. There must be a limit to it. Of course, if all humans died eventually we would die to as we need their blood to live. But even if that were not so, if we found some way to engineer blood to drink, how long would we live?

Sometimes I admit it has been this curiosity which has kept me from ending my own life. There have been dark days. After what happened with Claudio, I wondered if the world would not be better without me in it.

This is why I think you will like Cosette. She was kind with me, those days. You would be grateful for her if you knew.

We had once had a conversation we’d had some time before about this very thing. How long can a vampire live? She had not been turned herself by then, all wide eyed, so small, she was. A little thing. She asked me how long a vampire can live. Well. She did not say this. We were speaking in an old kind of French which you would not know if you heard it, but the precise words are not important.

And I am curious. I try to keep a record now, of places I go. I have portraits painted. I hope this way that even when I forget who I was when these moments were captured I might look at myself and recognise him. That way I will be able to know how long I have lived within a few thousand years of error, I hope. So I can have an answer for Cosette’s question.

I have not seen her for some time. I wonder if she has worried about me. She does this sometimes, when she does not hear from me, especially when things are turbulent as this. It is sweet.

Ach, I am being so sentimental. I have felt it since… Since what happened. I do not feel myself. It frightens me. I do not— it is unpleasant.

The thing is that I have found these records of this man I was looking for. It is some hours away to drive, but I’ll go there and I will try to ask him some questions. I have a feeling he will not be particularly forthcoming.

CLICK

CLICK

[WIND IN TREES]

I was correct; he was not forthcoming. He let me into his house and I spoke with him, though. He is older but not elderly, suspicious of me.

At first I thought it was because I seemed young but it was clear within a few minutes he knew what I was, though my exact identity seemed unknown to him. With Tim Sherman, you recall, he knew me so quickly.

This man spoke a little, told me he could not explain what his work with Bonham had entailed, and then he asked me to leave. I might’ve refused but he said his daughter was stopping by with children. No child should have to find their father’s smeared remains.

So I left.

And now all there is is to wait, non?

What a terrible tour of Europe you have been getting. I have not shown you any of my favourite places, it is terrible. I shall have to make an itinerary for us for when. For after. For you.

Ach.

You need to be on your own but I am getting this sense you are bad at making decisions. I can feel you hurting, mon râleur. What have done to yourself now, hmm? Cut off more appendages?

I wonder what it was you were hoping to observe, when you cut off your toes. Dear Casper always wished to learn how long a limb might be severed before being reattached. It was bizarre to me. He would also measure them, the fingers. See if they had grown, cut from him.

Ah the blood it prioritises the teeth, he told me this, and I knew it of course from experience. But he wanted the priority of all of these things. Teeth; eyes; fingers. What had I experienced myself

Of course I told him the truth which was that whenever I have been injured in such a manner the need to hunt has consumed me so thoroughly that I was not in a particularly useful state of mind so as to note if it were my eyes or my nose I recovered first. But I think it was my eyes.

Eh I do not understand this, and it was not of concern until recently because. Those people at the place where—

Where I was taken. Where I had been taken.

They knew. They knew.

They were talking about which parts of me would come back first. They could even approximate how long it would take. They broke my bones before they took my teeth so it would be harder to fight. They had a system, carefully co-ordinated specifically to—

They are as skilled at disarming and killing vampires as I am.

QUIET

Alfie, I think what they have been doing is worse than we understand. I. I was not conscious enough, from their drugs, from the way they were draining my blood. I was not present enough in my mind to catch much of what they were saying but… I. They wanted…

Putain de merde, non. Non.

What they took. They mostly. They seemed to want to know if there was much difference. In how it would come back for me. How long. If they changed this, burned that. How long.

I have this. This feeling. This pull. It is not unlike when a vampire I have swapped a lot of blood with is far away. I can focus on the feeling if I wish, I feel a pull towards it, leading me…

But this. It is. It’s pulling me to. To I think. The bits of me they took.

NEIGE IS BREATHING ODDLY

I am restored now, I think. There is no pain inside me like there was when we first left Scotland. Aches and stabs. The only thing within me that troubles me is this fucking wire. Je déteste ça. And sometimes I think it is catching in me, but. Ce n’est pas grave.

Merde.

Je pleure, ah.

NEIGE LAUGHS SADLY.

I am okie. It will be fine. I should rest before I take this man. I should probably hunt. He has not been associated with Bonham for a long time and if he had active connections I think I would not have been able to find him. But still. I do not trust him not to try to hurt me, and I would prefer to take him alive.

I don’t trust myself to able to do that unless I have been sated.

I will hunt. I will think of you. Their blood is not as sweet as yours. I miss you.

CLICK

CLICK

[WIND IN TREES]

I have been away and returned. The daughter’s car is still parked upon the driveway. I can hear voices inside the house. The old man, his daughter, and two children. They are young, the children they can run but their language is broken and stilted and they cannot reason with each other. They scrap like puppies and the adults pretend they cannot hear, but they can.

They are going on a cruise. The woman and the children are. The old man is meant to go but he will not. He is feigning enthusiasm but he is setting up the possibility that he will not come. The daughter, she is saying — oh, fascinating. She says he always does this, that he. Hmm. She hardly knew him when she was a child because he was always at work. His wife left him because of this.

The children argue. There are plush animals in the backroom. They both prefer the same one and wish to be its puppeteer.

Now the old man’s voice is different. Sadder. He says he is sorry. He says he was doing important work, life-saving work. He was trying to save— oh! Save her sister, voila. It did not help in the end, the daughter says. She. Oh, non, cherie. She says he loved Anita more than he loves her. Sometimes she feels like she lost him too, when she died. Oh la.

Zut alors, Tim Sherman, do you recall?! He said all of those who worked for Bonham, he was helping them, he had been dosed with the blood himself, I wonder…

Oh. The old man, he says he had no choice and he is sorry, and now— bon! She is finally leaving.

Excuse, pardon. I will fill you upon my return. I should go.

CLICK

CLICK

[CAR ENGINE QUIETLY PURRING; RAIN DRUMS ON THE ROOF; NOW AND THEN THE ENGINE GROWLS AND THINGS MOVE AROUND IN THE CAR; NEIGE DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THIS]

The necessity to move to a secondary location has been made apparent to me. My earlier intuition that he was not in contact with Bonham may be incorrect. Maybe he’s bluffing, but I am not willing to bet my fucking internal organs on that. He says he knew I’d be able to hear him speaking from the car so he waited until he saw I had gone to call them and say I was here. He does still not seem to know who I am, which is very helpful.

The daughter left, and as soon as the car was gone my intention was to go in, but he started speaking to me from inside when I was still behind the hedges, said he knew I was out here, that people were coming. Ha. I think he thinks I am some reckless youngster. There was a rather fascinating implication to what he said, you know, an implication that some of the children he had worked with Bonham on, they went on to turn them into vampires.

That is what killed his daughter. It is also why he left his job, I think. She was dead, when he left, but they had her. I am assuming she is one of those vides, your half-mades.

Well I am sure I will elicit more details from him when I have found a suitable place to stop. I think some thirty miles or so from here there is an house I have used before, but. Eh, this thing started happening a few years ago, my reliable ruins keep being bought by people with cameras and no skills in carpentry who are hell bent on ruining the internal structures. It has become a challenge to find places which are properly abandoned in the countryside which are not also at risk of entirely collapsing upon you the moment you step inside.

Here is what I am curious about. It seems like much of Bonham’s work was informed by Henri’s, which makes little sense to me unless they were also in contact when Casper was in contact with him, or unless I have a traitor. Now I suspect that Rosalind has been less than honest with me about the safety of the books I entrusted to her but she had a soft spot for Casper, so it would make sense for her to lend one of them to him, inadvisable as that may have been. Perhaps then the rest of the books are safe with her as they are meant to be and I do not need to be concerned again that they should have been destroyed.

They made the case between them, Rosalind et Casper, that they should be left in tact. Casper wrote to me; Rosalind had implored him to. He said there was no use in the destruction of information which might prove useful to vampires in the future. Useful how? I do not know. But there we are. I suspected he meant to imply that Henri’s work contained within it some basis for the cure but I do not know.

Rosalind’s case was entirely different and more sentimental. Henri was one of her own. After I had brought down Claudio , she was the one who had made the case for me to keep Henri alive, despite the fact he bowed so deep when I fist met him his nose touched the floor. I do not enjoy such reverence. But Rosalind said he was just young and afraid, that he was clever; that’s why she had picked him to be a vampire. He was sweet. He was interesting. She pled for his life on this.

I met with him first, of course, before I made my decision. I would not risk making such a decision simply based on his maker’s recommendation. Had I not just suffered the devastating consequences of such sentimentality in what Claudio had wrought upon the world? I did not kill him when I should have because I loved him. If I made a mistake with Henri, I risked dooming Rosalind, who had become a confident of mine, terrified of me though she was, to the same fate I had just played out myself. That particular pain of killing something you love. The burden of responsibility upon your shoulders when one whose existence is a consequence of your own actions commits an horrible crime. Unforgivable acts.

I ask myself, you know, should I have known? Should I have looked at Claudio and understood what he was, somehow? Could I not have tasted it on his blood? I think back to the early days of his vampire life. The dozens of people he killed before I could catch him and shut him away. Had I not known he was angry, could I not have anticipated this kind of behaviour, and once observed should I not have concluded he would not suit this life as well as I had hoped?

Should I have left him to starve in that sealed tomb instead of feeding him each day?

We spoke a lot, through that stone seal. He talked about his human life and childhood. I told him about how long I had wandered the world, about some of the things I had found there. To pass the time I taught him old versions of languages he already spoke. He was clever, too. He liked how languages locked together. They joined up like constellations, he said, a marvel. And then he said he could not wait to see how those we spoke to each other would change over time.

I do not know why, but this is somehow what convinced me he would be safe to be freed. He was dreaming of the future. Imagining longevity. Surely this meant he would not be so reckless in the present, if he longed to live beyond it?

So I let him out.

I let him live.

It is a complicated question of responsibility. In my life I have made so few by my own volition, unless I have some great forgetting, but so many alive now were made by Claudio with my blood. Still I feel some obligation towards them, but it is that because they are made with a part of myself? Or is it because I made Claudio, and by executing him I place myself as their…

The obligation is not that of a parent and child. We are too often lovers with those we change, or close platonic friends of mutual respect, for such a dynamic to be an appropriate comparison. And still it is somehow familial.

Those we make owe us nothing. The vampire who supposes those he creates to be obliged to serve or attend to him somehow is a vampire who does not deserve those things.

 And truly our makers do not owe us their attention nor do we necessarily need it to survive, as I have proven by continuing to exist all this time.

What distresses me, I think, in the idea of my obligation to Claudio; to Henri… what distresses me is this notion of obligation, of duty, which I felt towards them. This feeling is not a natural consequence but a personal flaw of mine which I bring. Is this a flaw which has always been alive in me or is it one I have acquired over time, like settling dust? I have been so old for so long now I do not know.

There are old rules of course, expectations, deferences. Hang-overs from the little assemblages which were dotted across the world before Claudio. Ancient vampires, the heads of little clans, an hierarchy of makers and made. There is a reason the image of the vampire lord haunts the memory humanity.

Claudio had no wish to be a king. Those he could convert to his cause he made defer to him absolutely. He would replace them with his captains sometimes, young women who had been socialites or courtesans, who he had groomed for power for decades or centuries. The old blood who disagreed became old blood he would drink.

This is all before he caught me, of course.

Claudio didn’t want to be a king, any way. He wanted to be an holy emperor. To be what the Roman Empire needed not to fall, or what he thought it needed, anyway…

I forget why it is I began to speak of this.

Ah, oui. Henri’s books. I have always been an advocate for change. I have always hoped that, I do not know. That things would not always be this way. That the way we are vampires and the way we treat each other, it can change and be reformed and we do not always have to live as we have always lived. Yes, that hope was what blinded me to the holes in Claudio. Gaping wounds which could not be filled.

That same hope was what drew me to Casper when I heard he had killed Antoinette.

It is what it is saw in Henri when I spoke to him that night as we walked by the Seine.

He spoke so eagerly of science and philosophy – back then you see they were almost the same sort of thing. He was a dreamer. He was so young, in body and as a vampire, not a decade old and barely two decades on this earth when he was turned.

Rosalind adored him and it was not hard to understand it. He was charming, witty, quick spoken. I enjoyed his company. Despite the ways he brought up again and again the magnificence of me, how he could not believe I was right there before him. Still. I let him go.

I think it was his failure to turn others he wished to that drove him to where he ended up, basement full of victims so hungry and furious they tore him to shreds without pause. I had noticed a vicious kind of envy when we had spoken about les vides. How he seemed to long for their thoughtlessness. He spoke of the violence that descends when we are starving as something almost holy. As close to pure feeling as we could ever get.

I saw the appeal in his words, I think. That was why they did not alarm me. I’d resolved that I would learn not to love. I have gone centuries without feeling it, before. I could coach myself into that state again, I was sure. I had begun to think of attachment as a kind of immaturity. It repulsed me that I had lived so long and not learned how to spurn it.

Some days I wished all I hungered for was blood. I let myself go too long without hunting so that it would consume all my other thoughts.

So, you see, when Henri told me about his thoughts I thought we dreaming in the same way. But, non. We were not.

Maybe it was that sense of familiar feeling that stayed my hand when Rosalind— ah. AH.

Putain de merde, Alfie, ce qui se passe!  Okie. Fuck.

[NEIGE BRIEFLY PULLS THE CAR OVER]

Okie. Okie. Well, fuck! This fucking— ah, AH what are they fuck— fuck.

[THE CAR GETS GOING AGAIN ALMOST IMMEDIATELY]

Okie. Something bad is happening, do not worry, I am coming.

[SOMETHING THUDS, LOUDER THAN THE MOVEMENTS EARLIER]

AH fuck this fucking man, this fucking man in the boot of the car, zut alors!

Priorities. Alfie. I am on my way to help you. Please hold on.

[THE ENGINE REVS; THE CAR SPEEDS AWAY. RAIN CONTINUES TO FALL]

END.